


To Have But Not Hold

by Lunarium



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, F/M, Hopeful Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-20
Updated: 2017-08-20
Packaged: 2018-12-17 14:46:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11853765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lunarium/pseuds/Lunarium
Summary: The quintessence was meant to keep Honerva beside him forever. Instead Zarkon suffers, for over ten thousand years.





	To Have But Not Hold

**Author's Note:**

> Written for lonkeronaama for the Galra Mini Exchange! :)

When he opened his eyes, she was not there. A table had been laid out beside him, presumably meant for her, but she was not on it. His first thought was that somehow she had survived, that only he had been affected by the overdose of quintessence, but then there would not have been need for two tables. That could not be the reason.

Or perhaps, he realized with a sudden coldness, she had been whisked away for embalming. 

Growing concerned, he searched for her and soon found a bundle hunched beside the embalming table. From his vantage point he could make out the long trail of white hair by what was not covered under the hood; the shoulders quivered as arms wrapped about herself. The fingertips, he noted, had turned violet, perhaps from lack of oxygen…or something else. When he called out her name, she did not answer. 

Her called her name again, and finally she turned towards him Eyes, pure liquid gold and radiating with pure light, regarded him. Recognition of the name shone in them, but she looked to him as if dazed. He could see the purple pigmentation has spread throughout her face and body. Yet changed though she was, she was still his wife, his beloved Honerva. As enchantingly beautiful as the day they first met. 

He offered his hand. Tentatively, she took it. Her nails dug into his palm until he bled. She would not kiss him nor draw in for an embrace. 

When Zarkon had declared war against all of Altea and King Alfor, it was for the homeland he had lost and for the excruciating heartbreak of the suffering woman beside him. A woman who would no longer answer to the name Honerva.

*

The quintessence had altered more than her appearance. Science whirled in her mind, and magic pulsed in her veins, rendering her more powerful than anything he had ever witnessed. A force so great, wrapped neatly into the form of a tiny hunched woman. A walking anomaly, she shadowed him everywhere he went like some terrible and loyal ghost. She was a reminder of what he had lost and once loved—no, still loved, still hurt and pined for. The very fact that she survived pleased him. The very fact that she lived in this cursed existence agonized him.

Zarkon loved her deeply and placed her advice above his top generals, and still she never responded to the name he used to whisper at night under warm skies of Daibazaal. Yet she would heed to any order, and gleefully so. Many suffered after she was given the command to interrogate, to torment, to kill. In those times she was most animate. But never would she even blink to a soft order to kiss him. 

She would be called by no other name other than Haggar, but she was loyal only to him.

*

Zarkon cursed the day he had lost her. She stood there, not sitting beside him as an equal and empress of the Empire, but there like one of his generals. No, above them, for Haggar was his most loyal advisor. But even then, she was not his. He could not touch her, could not sweep down to kiss her as he once did, pick her up and settle her on their majestic wide bed as he once had, many eons ago. Could not weave the words he troubled to speak into passionate acts instead, show her the love that still burned for her even as galaxies grew cold in the passage of time.

She was his in many ways, but not as this. Not in the manner that would have meant the most. She would remain standing by his throne, his most loyal servant. Never remembering but loyal. His beloved ghost. 

The lack of her proximity left him cold, and it seeped to the very edges of the universe. 

In silence he suffered. He hated. In madness he searched for another means to replace Honerva.

*

When Alfor had ripped away the Black Lion from his grip as last resort, Zarkon had paid in same, by stealing the Red Lion in return. The beast now resided in their fleet, but his mind ever searched for the Black Lion and where the Altean had stowed it away.

Getting the Black Lion would not bring her back, but it would be some semblance of normalcy, to reach out in the never-ending dark for a past cruelly ripped out from him. 

It filled him with a purpose. It would not replace her, but he had finally found a means to fill the void. 

And so Zarkon’s attention became that of finding the Black Lion, a thing he loved as much as Honerva.

*

Perhaps learning to let go could have done him some good. He loved her so deeply, and for that he should have let her go when it was time. She had been dying. But her research had provided invaluable conclusions: quintessence was life. And life he would gladly give her, a thousandfold over, just to keep her with him.

And the old gods, long hidden shut in the forgotten books of myths in Daibazaal, now laughed and leered at his hubris. To have Honerva still but not to hold her, that was his punishment for entering the Rift. And it enraged him. Enraged him further when he learned he could not further use quintessence to fix his love’s predicament, when he learned of the fate of his home planet, when he locked himself into an ugly stalemate of a war with his once best friend till he tasted blood and felt bitterly unsatisfied even after Alfor took his final breath. 

But he never learned how to just let it go, Zarkon mused as he fought to the bitter end against the new paladin of the Black Lion. He was stubborn in that regard. He never learned to let go.

*

“Husband, come back to me.”

He dared not to hope. He heard her words. The voice was the same as the last ten thousand years but there was an inflection not present from before, a style of speech she used to use around him. 

An echo from an era long gone. 

He had nearly died in his thirst to gain back the Black Lion. The young human proved himself to be a formidable foe, easily breakable though humans were. But to outwit death twice would be laughable. He had grown so old and suffered too long. Perhaps this was his temptation towards the afterlife. The fabled gods did enjoy to toy with him. 

But the touch was real. It was hers. And so was her command. Fierce as in the last ten thousand years. But so, miraculously, was the _knowing_ in her voice. After ten thousand years years of hiding in the dark, Honerva spoke again. She _remembered_. 

His eyes flew open to the light.


End file.
